OREANDA-NEWS. November 7, 2011. Rosstat has today (3 Nov) reported that Russian CPI was 7.2% YoY in Oct 2011 vs the Bloomberg consensus estimate of 7.0%. CPI was unchanged on September and  thus ended a four months of consecutive declines. In MoM terms inflation added 0.5%, while consensus was looking for 0.3% and the September figure was zero.

Core inflation rose to 5.6% YtD from 5.1% in September, with the 0.5% MoM growth in line with the September increase.

Bottom line: Inflation trending lower since June this year was stalled in October, while at the same time core inflation moved higher. Part of the explanation is the rouble’s depreciation (note that in October the rouble actually appreciated, but the October inflation level was still affected by the 12% depreciation in September). We would also note that based on weekly inflation rates, the MoM inflation figure of 0.5% was a real surprise. Given the weekly figures, reported inflation should have come in around 0.2% MoM in October. The discrepancy is most likely due to a smaller sample of commodities surveyed for the weekly figures vs  the monthly numbers.